Ben Jao Ming

In brief: New SUSE, first release from OpenSUSE.org, comes in OSS Edition (100% Open Source, only available on 5 CD ISOs) and Eval Edition (free and unlimited, but contains closed source. DVD or 5 CD ISOs), has been tested in 4 beta releases and 1 release candidate. This review is based on the Eval DVD, but if you don’t like reading you can just skip directly to the screenshots.

Version numbers:

• KDE 3.4.2
• Gnome 2.12
• Firefox 1.0.6 (1.0.7 update is available)
• GCC 4.0
• OpenOffice 1.9.125 (the latest version is 2.0 RC1 which is not yet available)
• Beagle 0.0.13 (newest version is 0.1.1)

Download:
There’s the OSS and the Eval versions. I suggest BitTorrent, since it won’t cost the mirror owners, and often proves to be faster.

A little download trick:
Since BitTorrent wasn’t available immediately I started an FTP download. After 1,6 GB I decided to do BitTorrent instead and here’s a little trick: Azureus (a BitTorrent client) scans files to see if they’ve changed (”Force rescan”). I started a new BitTorrent download which creates a full-sized, empty file. This file was then overwritten with the partly finished FTP download:

Copy it:
commandline:~$> cp ftp_download.iso bittorrent.iso

Or move it:
commandline:~$> mv ftp_download.iso bittorrent.iso

Or copy it with Data Dump:
commandline:~$> dd -if=ftp_download.iso -of=bittorrent.iso

After that I did the rescan and Azureus started downloading all the missing pieces. Surprisingly my ISO ended up with the correct MD5sum.

Installation:
The installation CD contains something I’ve never seen before: An animated Grub splash! It has those little lemming penguins (”Pingus”) crawling the splash screen. It’s not serious, but who cares when it’s only on the installation boot loader.

During installation I encountered what many people have: Everything boots just fine but when you reach the process of package selection YaST suddenly says: “Oh my, I can’t figure out an automatic package selection”. Since about 98.6% of the DVD is made up of RPMs there’s a big chance that you won’t see your burn errors before package selection or package installation. I suggest that you always check the dvd after burning (K3B can do that). I never succeeded creating a useful DVD-R.

Don’t burn ISOs:
If possible I suggest that you simply avoid burning ISOs. Instead you could put the contents of the DVD ISO on a LAN FTP site, web server, you could place it on a seperate partition and mount it or simply not download any ISO at all and just point it directly at an Internet Installation. All you’ll need is the Network Install CD which is a small ISO of 64 MB. In return you’ll save your money on the DVD-R, save time burning and verifying and last but not least the installation process will run faster.

No changes in the installation process: YaST looks the same except that it has more clear graphics and fonts, reacts faster to user input and creates installation options faster (hardware scan, package selection, firewall setup etc.).

After rebooting once you’ll see your new SUSE boot splash. It’s very blue and with nice Crystal icons. The first boot is slow because alot of stuff is being initialized for the first time. OpenSUSE has launched a new project (”SUPER”) to speed up performance. Init scripts have been made to preload common libs, KDE, OpenOffice and Firefox. It doesn’t make booting faster but ensures faster application startups.

Booting is still slow: I did a small test myself (2.4 GHz P4, 512 MB RAM). Services on all installation are as identical as possible. I measured a 37% speed increase from 9.3 to 10.0.

1. SUSE 10.0: 50 sec
2. Ubuntu 5.04: 55 sec
3. FC4: 1 min 5 sec.
4. SUSE 9.3: 1 min 20 sec

Graphics and fonts are smoother which is the result of a better ATI driver I suppose. SUSE 9.3 didn’t look clear, but 10.0 certainly does. Using the Eval version means that you get some Adobe fonts which are better looking than the usual Sans Serif. There’s also a good tutorial about getting even better-looking fonts.

YAsT still kinda sucks: You get all these great features packed in this horrible GUI. Nothing has changed here. Pretty icons, impossible navigation, dead-slow scripts (they’ve even added a few). “Back”, “Abort” and “Finish” buttons (but no “Apply” or “Save”). You want to do package management 90% of the time, but can’t find the icon to click.

Setting up the desktop usually means changing the font size, removing the wallpaper and adding shortcuts to the quick launch bar. Most of the SUSE crowd uses KDE and here’s a hint for ensuring that your GTK applications look the same:

Most settings are handled by the GTK-QT Engine which is installed per default. Fonts apparently aren’t. You can launch the Gnome font control panel by typing:

commandline:~$> gnome-font-properties

After changing your settings you’ll need to add a link that launches your Gnome settings daemon. Use Konqueror to navigate to your /home/user/.kde/Autostart dir. Right-click and choose “Add -> Application Shortcut”. In the application tab type in
‘/opt/gnome/lib/control-center-2.0/gnome-settings-daemon’.

I am also very pleased that Beagle works! Clicking the “Launch Beagle Daemon” link actually launches the daemon and makes searching your SUSE partition possible. It’s fast and pretty. Sadly the system tray icon has disappeared. But hey, it’s a good bargain! By default it’s only the root partition that has a “user_attr” option in /etc/fstab. This is the option that makes Beagle index the partition.

Apart from the Beagle app, we’d all like to see some more of that SuperKaramba. But it’s not included. Shame on you, SUSE! Amarok works like a charm (it crashed alot under SUSE 9.3), Kopete can connect to MSN again and by installing the new KOffice you get Krita (the new image software) and Kexi (pretty alternative and featureful database GUI). I’d like to test all the apps, but there are too many =) One important note though is that you get 450 packages less on the Eval DVD than on the 5 CDs. Thunderbird is amongst the packages missing on the DVD.

I also tried Gnome out and it was almost as bad as YaST (which actually refused to start once under Gnome). The themes looked horrible, and there was nothing to do because my changes weren’t applied. But after uninstalling the gtk-qt-engines it worked. Icons are a weird mix of Crystal icons and standard Gnome icons. It looks awful that way! I don’t mind Gnome but it seems SUSE has done a bad job (or none at all) of trying to make it look close to acceptable.

The new SUSE runs like butter, and with a little time spend you’ll probaby have a desktop with nothing missing, but nothing surprising. If you like, TuxMachines (screenshots galore!) and Geektime Linux (no screenshots) also did some very nice reviews. Oh, and by the way…

Happy updating!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 9th, 2005 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.